Well, I'll say right up front that I am not a developer and I haven't
written any code in many years. I will tell you what I believe to be
the case and maybe someone else on this list can confirm or deny it:

* you write your source (C?) code as a bunch of callable routines
* compile and link (ld) these - there are probably some specific
switches you must use (-b I think)
* if you compiled these as separate files, you can use the ar
command to manage them
* the shared library should be named with a ".sl" suffix - don't
just rename it that way. if you did the compile correctly, it
should come out that way.
* you don't necessarily load a shared library into memory by
itself. a program that needs it will call routines in it - refer
to system calls like dlopen, dlclose, dlget, etc.
* there are specific PATH constraints on the location of shared
libraries. do more research on this
* shared libraries are actually invoked by a system process named
dld.sl. refer to the man page on this for more details.

I'm sure there is much more to this than I've stated here. The man page
for dld.sl has a lot of information. Check out the "See Also" section.
The end of that man page refers to other online and printed reference
material.

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